Gerakan Youth Secretary General Dr Dominic Lau today welcomed the cabinet’s new decision of loosening the application requirements for JPA scholarship for both local and oversea education. Dr Lau feels that it would be even ideal if the government could institutionalize this policy in order to make it a solid regulation and not a policy which could be amended at any point of time.

According to the World Bank report which was recently released, Malaysia is said to be facing serious brain drain issue and is unable to compete with its’ neighboring country in terms of human resource capacity. Malaysia’s brain drain issue had been deteriorating for some time whilst the new ETP project is a mega project which requires a lot of talents from various industries in order for the transition to take place smoothly. Dr Lau praised that the loosening of the scholarship application requirement is a positive start by the government in Human Capital investment.

Dr Lau added, allowing more students to benefit from the scholarship is only an initial move in nurturing talents, the government has to think of a way to attract oversea students to return to our country to work, especially those who went oversea using the government scholarship. If the government failed to do so, all effort to produce human resource would be gone to waste. The money used to support students to study oversea are after all tax payer’s money, hence, the government has to find a way to eradicate the factors which deters the oversea students from returning to their homeland to work. Based on the report, the main deterring factors are unfair government policies, social injustice and incompetent remuneration. The government needs to think of a way to improve the living standard of the nation by first of all removing the obstacles that are blocking the nation from developing, only then would the country regains it’s bargaining power to attract the oversea Malaysians to return to work in Malaysia.